PMA Divisional Beowulf

Investigation of the nonlinear growth of r-modes in young, rapidly rotating neutron stars. The r-mode instability in the young remnants of supernovae could be one of the most important sources of gravitational waves for the Earth-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO. While for the moment the main numerical simulations are being run on CACR's HP supercomputers, the Divisional Beowulf is used for post-processing tasks and as a high level rendering platform for animations such as this quicktime movie (investigators: L. Lindblom, J. Tohline and M. Vallisneri; please see this page).

Study of the chaotic dynamics of small black holes inspiraling into supermassive galactic black holes. Understanding these orbits is crucial to understand the gravity-wave signals that will be collected by the NASA-ESA space mission LISA. Thousands of different orbits must be examined separately, which makes a cluster like this the ideal platform (investigators: S. Phinney and M. Hartl).

Study of cyclotron line formation in accreting X-ray pulsars. Accreting neutron stars provide unique laboratories to study exotic physical processes that occur under extreme conditions of energy and magnetic fields. Matter in the accretion column is heated violently at the neutron star surface producing high-energy photons. The electrons in the outer magnetosphere interact with these photons generating a characteristic cyclotron absorption spectrum. The numerical simulations performed on this cluster aim at producing theoretical templates to fit the complex and poorly understood spectroscopic line shapes of the sources measured by RXTE (investigators: R. Araya-Gochez, W. Heindl, W. Coburn).

Teaching. Finally, the cluster is used in the ph21 undergraduate course to teach the basics of parallel programming, including topics such as master-slave and peer-to-peer paradigms, the MPI library, load balancing, and more.